IB World Religions 6.3.3. Development and Interpretation: Halakhah, Aggadah, Codes and Responsa Notes

6.3.3. Development and Interpretation: Halakhah, Aggadah, Codes and Responsa

Halakhah

1. Halakhah is Jewish law. The word comes from a root meaning to walk, so it names the way a Jew walks rather than a list of offences and penalties.
2. Halakhic material asks what a person must actually do. It covers prayer, food, business, marriage, mourning, farming and Shabbat, and it does not separate ritual duties from ethical ones.
3. Its raw material is the Torah's mitzvot read through the Oral Torah, so a halakhic argument almost always moves between a verse and the rabbinic discussion of that verse.
4. The reasoning is rule-governed rather than free. The tradition lists interpretive principles, among them kal va-chomer, the argument from the lighter case to the heavier, and gezerah shavah, which links two passages sharing a phrase.
5. The rabbis also legislate protectively. A gezerah is a fence placed around a commandment so that people do not come near breaking it, and a takkanah is a positive enactment made for the good of the community.
6. This is why Jewish law grows instead of standing still. New rulings answer new circumstances, and they are written down so that later authorities can weigh them.

Aggadah and Genesis Rabba

1. Aggadah is everything in rabbinic literature that is not law: story, ethics, theology, history, medicine, folklore and the sayings of the sages.
2. The two kinds of material run together on the page. A Talmud passage may settle a legal question and then, without warning, tell a story about the rabbi who decided it.
3. Aggadah does not bind in the way halakhah binds. Jews have never been required to accept a particular aggadic story as an account of fact.
4. Its work is moral formation. It supplies narratives of exemplary figures, showing what a person of character does rather than stating what the law demands.
5. Midrash, from a root meaning to search out, is rabbinic interpretation that works through a biblical book verse by verse. Collections of it were assembled from about the third century onwards.
6. Genesis Rabba, in Hebrew Bereshit Rabbah, was compiled in the land of Israel by around the fifth century. It expounds Genesis in this way and is the most studied of the aggadic collections.
7. Much of its work is filling silences. Genesis says nothing about Abraham before God speaks to him, and Genesis Rabba supplies a childhood for him.

The law codes

1. The Talmud is superb for argument and poor as a reference book. Its conclusions sit buried inside debates, scattered across tractates and often left open.
2. The codes answer that problem by stating settled law without the discussion. Each new code was controversial for the same reason, because it hid the reasoning that produced the ruling.
3. Maimonides completed the Mishneh Torah around 1180. It arranges the whole of Jewish law in fourteen books, in clear Hebrew, and states each ruling flatly without naming its sources.
4. Critics objected that a reader could no longer check how a ruling had been reached. Later editions printed sharp glosses beside the text, most famously those of Abraham ben David of Posquieres.
5. Jacob ben Asher produced the Arba'ah Turim, the four rows, in the fourteenth century. He kept only the laws still practicable after the loss of the Temple, which made the work usable in the Diaspora.
6. Joseph Karo built on it with the Shulchan Arukh, the set table, completed in Safed and printed in 1565. It follows Sephardi practice, and Moses Isserles of Krakow added glosses called the Mappah, the tablecloth, recording Ashkenazi custom.
7. That pairing made one book work for both communities. The Shulchan Arukh remains the standard reference for Orthodox practice, studied today alongside the Mishnah Berurah of Israel Meir Kagan.

Responsa

1. Responsa, in Hebrew she'elot u-teshuvot, questions and answers, are written rulings issued by a rabbinic authority in reply to a question put to him.
2. The form is old and unbroken. It runs from the Geonim who headed the Babylonian academies in the seventh century through to rabbis answering by email now.
3. A responsum is not a general essay. It answers one specific case, names the sources it relies on, and reasons from them to a conclusion the questioner can act on.
4. The questions record Jewish life as it was actually lived. They deal with business partnerships, converts, plague, forced conversion, abandoned wives and disputed inheritances.
5. Modern questions turn on technology and medicine. They ask whether electricity may be switched on during Shabbat, whether organs may be donated after death, and how Jewish law regards fertility treatment.
6. Non-Orthodox movements run comparable bodies. Reform rabbis in North America publish responsa through their rabbinical conference, and Conservative Judaism rules on such questions through its Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.
7. Hundreds of thousands of responsa survive. Searchable databases now let a rabbi follow how one question has been answered across many centuries and countries.

Orthodoxy's first principles

1. Orthodox authorities meet a new question by working back to the sources rather than by amending the law.
2. The route is fixed. It runs from Torah to the Talmud's treatment of it, then to the codes, then to the responsa of recognized authorities, and a ruling is judged by how faithfully it follows that chain.
3. New circumstances therefore yield new applications rather than new principles. Whether electricity may be used on Shabbat is settled by asking which of the 39 categories of forbidden labour it most resembles.
4. Reform and Liberal Judaism proceed differently. Holding ethical mitzvot binding while treating ritual ones as open to revision, they ask whether a given law still serves the purpose for which it was given.
5. Conservative Judaism stands between them. It holds halakhah binding while regarding it as historically developed, so its committee can permit changes that Orthodox authorities will not.
6. All of them work from the same library. The disagreement is about what may be done with a precedent, not about which texts count as authoritative.

Dispute as method

1. Rabbinic literature preserves disagreement instead of resolving it, and Jews treat that as a feature of the tradition rather than a flaw in it.
2. A recorded disagreement is a machloket. The Talmud reports the debates of the schools of Hillel and Shammai at length, deciding most of them for Hillel while keeping Shammai's reasoning on the page.
3. The Talmud explains why both are kept with a line about those debates: these and these are the words of the living God.
4. Interpretation is layered as well as contested. The tradition names peshat, the plain sense, remez, allusion, derash, the searched-out meaning, and sod, the hidden or mystical sense.
5. The layers are not rivals. One verse may carry a plain meaning and a homiletic one at the same time, and only halakhic conclusions are expected to be settled.
6. The method is still practised daily. Students in a yeshivah work in chavruta, in pairs, arguing a passage aloud, which reproduces the shape of the text they are studying.
7. This is why Jews speak of a developing tradition rather than a finished one. Each generation adds its reading to a record that was built to be added to.